the whole world burns

Archive for category 'movies'

Fascinating to see the use of greenscreens even for commonplace scenes. The Ugly Betty example is amazing: easier/cheaper to film street and add an actor to it later than actually film them on location! Also interesting that the 2012 reel has fewer screens. Background replacement must be getting easier.

We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.

The Pentagon, Present Day: Maximus washing his hands in a men’s room sink. He stars at himself in the mirror…reflecting. Mordecai stands behind him…whispers: “Until eternity itself has said it’s prayers.” Maximus exits; proceeds into a large war room containing a dozen men in suits.

Just as spilling means licking in fraternities at college, so crunching shall mean skullfucking under my regime at the picture house.

[Y]our toddler cannot understand the movie and must therefore pay a surcharge of £900 on his or her ticket, both for taking up valuable space in the theatre and for putting the entire audience on amber alert for a loud case of ‘the grumpies’. In such cases, a knowing smile and statement attesting to your child being "overtired" are neither satisfactory nor welcome. You will be ejected from the cinema post-haste, and your child will be fired from a cannon on the roof of the cinema through the icy freeze of outer space and into the heart of the sun.

JULES presses his knife to BRETT's throat
J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!
I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?

It's insane. We honestly have no idea how this all happened. The original marketing plan for Once was to get one 35mm print made, which was going to cost us like four grand. A lot of money. We were going to drive around Ireland in a car, and [writer/director] John [Carney] was going to introduce the film. We figured there were enough Frames fans in Ireland to fill the cinemas. I was going to play a few songs with Mar at the end, and we were going to sell the DVD on the way out. That was huge.

In a 1984 interview with Charles Tesson in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Hu made a pretty surprising statement when discussing Come Drink With Me:"I didn't want to use real martial arts what we call real kung-fu. I had seen it in tournaments, I didn't find it very beautiful and I didn't understand a thing about it; as a matter of fact, I still don't." The question practically asks itself: how could a man with no interest in martial arts revolutionize martial arts cinema? The fact of the matter is, Hu never saw the martial arts in his films solely as "action"; for him, to have "action" occur on the screen was not enough to make a film an action movie. The kung-fu in Come Drink With Me (and in his later Wuxia films like Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch Of Zen) was never conceived as actual confrontation, but as dance, performance. In fact, the action in the film(s) is choreographed to the performing style of Beijing Opera and the rhythm and beat of its orchestral score (a score mainly performed by traditional instruments from Opera, the wailing flute and the Chinese tempo-drums).

Most people know two things about the Hays Code. One is that the bedrooms of all married couples could contain only twin beds, which had to be at least 27 inches apart. The other is that although the Code was written in 1930, it was not enforced until 1934, and that as a result, the "pre-Code cinema" of the early 1930s violated its rules with impunity in a series of "wildly unconventional films" that were "more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre" than in any other period of Hollywood's history.

Neither of these things is true.

Small things, links and miscellany, sparkling with light. Sam's tumblelog.